Monday, November 2, 2015

I love the recent pro-Empire Star Wars revisionism from conservatives

When I was a kid, it was all so simple, the rebels were good and the Empire was evil. Why? How could anything called the Dark Side be good? Although for all we know that was probably just good marketing by the Jedi, like how the pro-choice people like calling the other side anti-choice or believe they want to wage a war on women. Anyway, I started rooting against the Old Republic in those horrible prequel movies, not because the movies were bad but because it was clear that there wasn't really anything good about the Old Republic at all. Day to day operations were run by bureaucrats with the leaders deeply influenced by an insular religious sect that liked pulling the strings behind closed doors. And as many people mentioned, if the Old Republic was so peaceful, why did they wage war on the separatists? They sounded like they just wanted a low regulation, free trade oriented group of systems to be a part of.

So I'm really enjoying the pro-Empire stuff filtering through conservative writers. It started a decade ago in The Weekly Standard with "The Case for Empire" and has hit hyper drive (sorry, had to) with the Force Awakens coming soon (already have tickets!!!). A few days ago, there was an actual defense of the destruction of Alderaan, comparing it to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

So, Alderaan was a legitimate military target. Was the level of force used against it justified? It’s a tricky question, but it seems the least bad of all the alternatives. Consider another option the Empire could have taken: invading Alderaan, removing its leaders and installing a pro-Empire regime. However, putting boots on the ground in this manner would likely have destabilized not only the planet but also the entire region, creating a breeding ground for religious terrorists and draining blood and treasure for decades. It’s not hard to imagine a Jedi State of the Alderaan System (JSAS, for short, though they’d likely prefer the simpler Jedi State (JS)) arising from the ashes of some ill-conceived invasion and occupation.

...

The destruction of Alderaan, then, is more analogous to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than it is to a “genocide.”* Yes, it was horrible, and yes, it would be nice if it didn’t happen. But it was an attack on a legitimate military target and defensible under Just War Theory, an attack intended to save lives by deterring other major powers from beginning conflicts of their own. The Imperial Grand Moff Tarkin is no worse than Democratic President Harry S. Truman — and no one worth listening to considers Truman to be a monster.

Then in the Free Beacon, the writer who defended the obliteration of Alderaan laments the Nazi like qualities of the pasty rebels, with the picture below being the cherry on top: